If you’re looking for an opportunity at a giant whitetail, the odds are far more favorable where the genes are good and the animals reach their prime, testament to both trigger restraint and, often, one-buck limits.
Ohio ticks all those boxes.
Josh Harsh hunts his uncle’s 60 acres in Champaign County. After seeing a monstrous deer there in 2019, Josh and a buddy decided to give the deer incentives to stay by planting food plots and putting out minerals.
Their efforts did exactly that. Not only did the buck regularly Hoover up the groceries, but it also packed on more inches. By June 2020, its 16-point rack had surpassed the 200-inch mark.
When the flow of trail camera images ceased, the 29-year-old welder from Mechanicsburg worried his Most Wanted had changed zip codes permanently. After taking a friend’s advice and moving his cameras, however, he learned the animal was still in the area.
“The first (new) photos of the deer showed the mass, so we kept putting out the minerals. The rack put on a little height, too. I credit the minerals for the growth spurt,” Josh told Gita Smith, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine.
Since the images indicated the buck was visiting the buffet from south of the setup, he put a stand 25 feet up a dead tree overlooking the route.
Josh climbed the oak at 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 6.
Soon after a friend called from his vehicle to say he’d seen a nice buck in the vicinity, a doe crested a hill about 200 yards away with a boyfriend in tow. As the two deer headed into a thicket, Josh pulled out his grunt call.
“Hoping they weren’t too far away to hear me, I grunted a couple of times,” he said.
The tactic worked, and the buck came back out and started toward him. But it wasn’t the deer he’d hoped it was.
Although it passed within easy range of his crossbow, Josh did nothing.
Forty-five minutes later, two does came in from downwind and hung around right in front of him. Josh worried they were going to smell him the whole time they were there.
As they were leaving, he spotted another buck – THE buck – approaching.
“I was terrified the deer was going to wind me, but it was so focused on those does, it never lifted its head,” he said.
After a third attempt to grunt and stop the great whitetail, Josh wound up taking the 20-yard shot by threading a bolt through a fork in a branch.
With a Buckmasters score of 207 5/8 inches, the huge 8x8 is the largest crossbow-felled buck ever recorded from Champaign County, Ohio.
— Read Recent Blog! How to Trick a Trickster: Justin Candido’s 2019 deer season ended on opening day. It took him a little longer and required more creativity last year.